


Drown Me Out

by countessofbiscuit



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Child Soldiers, Clones, Gen, Introspection, Jedi, Kamino, Order 66, The Force, episodic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 14:28:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15731292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/countessofbiscuit/pseuds/countessofbiscuit
Summary: Hear, for thy children speak, from the uttermost parts of the sea!- "The Song of Sons" by R. Kipling





	Drown Me Out

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for romanaisalive's prompt "Shaak Ti: Pain," as part of [Jedi Fest's](http://jedifest.tumblr.com/) Alien April 2018 Exchange. Crossposted from [tumblr](http://countessofbiscuit.tumblr.com/post/172480464690/drown-me-out).
> 
> "The Clone Wars have always been, in and of themselves, from their very inception, the revenge of the Sith.” - _RotS_ novelization, by Matthew Stover.

Shaak Ti was centered.

Perched on the sloping roof of an observation tower, a Kaminoan pressure storm billowing around her, she had to be. Her robes flapped violently about her red limbs like the wings of an angry avril, riding gusts of wind strong enough to lift her lekku.

Even with her amethyst eyes opened wide onto the raging seas, another Jedi would have said the Master was meditating.

But Shaak Ti wasn’t opening up to the Force. Far from it. She kept it at arm’s length, touching it only as much as she needed to tether her to the titanium dais. She wanted peace, she wanted serenity, she wanted harmony, but not that which the Force could give.

It had already given her enough.

The air buffeting her hollow montrals went some way towards deafening what her inner strength could not.

The grunts of surprise and shallow sighs as thousands of hearts ceased beating behind shells of plastoid. The resultant cries in the Force that pierced lightyears of space-time and stabbed her chest and assaulted her head with all the shrill malice of an acklay. The one overwhelming wave of loss that thrummed through her till she felt nauseous, yet did nothing, in its cold way, to wash away the pain.

Shaak Ti respected the Force like she respected the vast and endless ocean before her, with all its power, depth, and mysteries. But she did not love it.

She loved a Kaminoan storm and the winds that silenced screams.

* * *

_“They’re only_ children. _This rapid ageing they speak of is no justification, merely a scientific platitude to mask an unethical truth. They are still children, Mace. Trained for death, but naïve about life. Surely you see this.”_

_“Ethics no longer come into it. As much as we may abominate it, a war has begun. They are clones, there are millions of them, and they are to be our charge. You clearly feel very … passionately about this, so the Council has suggested you take responsibility not for the troopers, but for the cadets on Kamino.”_

_“Cadets?”_

_“The children, Ti. The_ actual _children.”_

_“They are all children.”_

* * *

Shaak Ti was still.

Braced against a communications console, the only movement in her tall frame was the slight rise and fall of her shoulders with each deep, measured breath as she tried to calm her roiling stomach.

Something completely foreign had shot through her skull and down her spine. Something unbidden in the Force.

A gasp not her own had escaped her chest, and when her knees gave out and she hit the cold floor, the unaccountable sound of plastoid cracking on durasteel echoed through the empty room.

Her montrals had never fooled her so vividly before.

In her first month on Kamino, true, they’d been playing tricks on her. Her tips would pick up tremors of distant cries, sending her wandering down corridors into the nursery and medcenters at unseemly hours and distracting her to no end. When she’d meditated to follow the disturbance to its source, the tremors, as if suddenly shot with some dark energy, had radiated like knives down her head and into her chest, and the pain that gathered there had been enough to physically stagger her where she sat.

She’d avoided her meditation chamber with some regret. But the pangs continued just the same. They came and went like the waves which battered the city’s lower superstructure—with less frequency maybe, but with the same inevitability. The cadence of her waking hours became an irregular staccato of breathless moments, and for the first time in Shaak Ti’s decided life, she’d become wary of the Force.

Because only the Force could have possibly shown her, with such horrific clarity, a dark and angular face she’d come to know so well, contorted by some unseen agony. 

In this moment, stilled like a wary tusk cat if only to minimize the disorientating vibrations in the room, Shaak Ti saw hundreds of faces. The physiognomy of each was identical, individuals distinguished only by scars, tattoos, facial hair. And the manner in which each one cried out inside a dark plastoid tomb. 

As if connected to their comms, she heard each and every one.

* * *

_CT-12/977, his small hand shielding his eyes from his thrashing hair, nudged an older cadet. He pointed to the brown beacon of the General, stationed high above on a narrow observation tower that mushroomed off the dome of the neighboring facility._

_“What’s she doing?”_

_The wind between them stole his words away, but the older cadet understood the questioning gesture well enough._

_“It’s some Jedi thing,” CT-11/356 replied into the younger cadet’s ear. “They say she can see the future better from up there.”_

_CT-12/977 whipped his head around in surprise. CT-11/356, happy with the effect of his answer (an honest one, as far as he could make out from older brothers’ chatter) preempted the cadet’s incredulous denial with a shrug._

_“Yep. Tomorrow, or maybe the next day, the longnecks on the mess holo will announce a big battle happening somewhere”—he pointed back at the Jedi—“and she will have seen it.”_

_“She can do that?”_

_“Yeah. Phrikin’ sweet, huh?”_

_The younger cadet nodded slowly. “But … there’s a war. There’s a lot of battles. Is she up there all the time? Can she see them all?”_

_The storm was intensifying around them, and an instructor beckoned for cadets to clear the training platform._

_“I dunno,” CT-11/356 said as they walked together. “But she probably wishes she could. General Ti has gotta be bored to Ilum and back being stationed here. Jedi are warriors, after all, just like us.”_

* * *

Shaak Ti was silent.

She didn’t need the Force to tell her something was wrong.

Over shouts and blaster fire, Skywalker’s heavy footfall drummed ever louder as he neared, his determined steps complemented by a booted tempo as familiar to the Master as her own heartbeat.

The warrior inside her rose up at the sound. The mother slumped low.

And Shaak Ti remained still and rooted to her stool, in a neglected pose she now embraced with all the desperation of a doomed heretic.

Long legs crossed. Red arms relaxed at her sides. Amethyst eyes closed. Mind, montrals, and soul opened to the Force.

Only to feel _nothing._

Worse than nothing. A cavernous, noiseless emptiness as if cut off from Jedi and trooper alike. Like a great scythe had emerged from the gloom and severed all strands of the Force, for good and ill, and left her floating in some starless space.

Master Plo had always described the Dark Side as something silky, something yawning and all-consuming. _Seductive._ Master Windu had indicated otherwise, and as he spoke from some unfortunate measure of experience, Shaak Ti had been used to consider his definition the truer one. He said it was something vicious. Rabid and infernal.

Maybe this … this vacuum, then, wasn’t the Dark Side. But it definitely was its _victory._

The thunder of a hundred boots coming to a decided halt outside her chamber was an almost welcome contrast.

Almost.

She hadn’t even bothered to lock the door, and Skywalker in turn didn’t bother to test it. His lightsaber simply seared its way through the metal, as it had likely done through hundreds of Separatist doors before.

Shaak Ti was no Separatist, but she might as well have been a droid, for all the nothingness where her heart should’ve been.

That same unusually stern voice that had hours ago demanded she release him from the secured Temple now rose in taunt.

“Turn around and open your eyes, Shaak Ti. Look what your children have done.”


End file.
